Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gandhi's weapon contained a measurable threat of violence in India. When Gandhi fasted, Britons sometimes dared not keep him in jail, lest a massive anger at his death in their hands engulf India. "I always get my best bargains behind prison bars," he once chuckled. When Gandhi fasted, Moslem, Hindu and Untouchable leaders had to promise to work better together, lest that anger of the masses be directed against them. No communal group, not the mighty British Raj itself, dared have Gandhi's blood on its hands...
...Could Spit . . ." With independence, Gandhi's great victory, came defeat. India, seething with fear and fanaticism, spurted blood in scores of riots. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, once a member of Gandhi's All-India Congress Party, bolted, saying that the Congress was an instrument to impose Hindu rule on India's Moslem minority. With a notably unmystical metaphor, Gandhi said: "If we Indians could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." But Jinnah refused to spit in unison with Hindus, for any cause. He demanded, and got, his separate...
Lone Voice. Independence without unity was as ashes in Gandhi's mouth. He continued to work for the reunion of Pakistan with India. But in the last half year of his life Gandhi found not only the Moslem leader, but many of his own Hindus, opposing attempts at reconciliation. Orthodox Hindus resented his inroads on Hindu customs which Gandhi considered brutal, and therefore indefensible: untouchability, suttee (widow suicide), child marriages. Hindu and Sikh refugees from Moslem hate and murder, pouring into Delhi and other Indian cities, clamored for revenge. The militant Hindu organization Mahasabha (Great Society), to which Gandhi...
Hindus, not Moslems, stoned Gandhi's house when he went to Calcutta to encourage communal peace last August. On his 78th birthday, Oct. 2, Gandhi spoke sadly: "Why do I receive all these congratulations? . . . The time was when whatever I said, the masses followed. But today I am a lone voice in India." In November, a TIME correspondent went to see him. Gandhi said: "Can you squat?" The reporter squatted. Gandhi at one point in the interview said: "Three hundred years is as nothing." He returned to the present: "The fear haunts me that India must yet go through...
Violence broke out in India anew after Gandhi's death. Fifty were reported killed as-Gandhi admirers exacted a blood price from the Mahasabha extremists. Some dared to hope that Gandhi's injunction to abhor violence might take on added force from his martyrdom...